The short version:
In October 2020, Office 365 is no longer developing new features for Exchange Web Services (EWS) in favor of the Graph API. Today we use EWS for both Office 365 and Exchange integrations. With the change in October, this is no longer the case and each calendar system will require separate consideration to maintain.
Before:
We used EWS for both Office 365 and Exchange integrations. This allowed the majority of development for Microsoft calendars to overlap and we treated Office 365 & Exchange the same. Unfortunately, this often lead to mismanaged expectations, because Exchange environments are more customizable & restrictive, creating feature deployment challenges.
After:
The development between O365 + Exchange is no longer shared. We've created two tracks of calendar integrations— O365 + Google, then Exchange.
While we believe there’s plenty of value for Exchange support for admin-centric deployments, and we will continue to support Exchange, deploying to end-users is unlikely to be a great experience. This is why we’ve decided to invest that time in sustainable areas Exchange is able to support well, while creating a path for those moving into Office 365 later on.
Who is affected?
- Offices using Exchange.
- Google & Office 365 will not be affected.
What's the same?
We'll continue to support Exchange for the things it's best at, like room displays, kiosks, admin-centric schedule management, and analytics. User impersonation is unsupported and the scheduling experience for employee-facing tools (e.g., the plugin, event management) remains limited.
What's different?
We are changing the way we develop features for Exchange and we expect to see a growing gap between the Office 365 and Exchange experiences. If you have a large end user base, we recommend exploring the migration to Office 365 before rolling out Robin to employees.
Why is it changing?
Microsoft is changing the way apps like Robin have to connect to O365 — which means Exchange and O365 will now have different development tracks. The “modern” options, Office 365 and G Suite, have stronger support and development resources, allowing us to prioritize maturing calendar systems development and user experience.
What's next?
The new Graph API offers more functionality that is unavailable to EWS, which means we can build things for Office 365 that Exchange would not allow. Whether you're a new customer or current customer, we encourage you to come along with us into "modern calendars" like Office 365 for the best Robin experience.
Tips to prepare for the transition